Cruising the Chilean Fjords and Darwin Channel Feb. 24-25, 2009

You can look at a map and try to comprehend this part of the world but until you spend a couple of weeks "cruising" it, you can't really grasp the remoteness, the beauty, the quiet, the wet, the cold, the dry and the hot. If you lifted the entire country off the map and brought it up to the west coast of the USA, then pasted the northern tip of Chile to the southern tip of the Baja of California and then flipped it over, you would almost have the identical climate! The northern part of Chile is DRY and HOT and near the Andes Mountains of course as Chile's widest part is about 150 miles wide and it's most narrow part (excluding the thousands of islands) is about 50 miles wide, so the Andes are never far away! Much like the southern part of the US west coast and Baja and the Rockies are not far away! The southern part of Chile is wet and cold, much like Seattle! Hence, flipping it gives you a climate like our west coast! The entire country is 2,730 miles long. They call it the "Shoestring" country as it is so narrow. There are 12 regions in Chile and I think we will see most all of them. Cruising these fjords has been a navigators dream/nightmare. Some of the islands we went through on this ship, I would be afraid to navigate our pontoon boat through! We had to pick up two "pilots" that stayed on our ship from Cape Horn to Valparaiso. They helped our captain with their "local knowledge" of the islands and fjords. The areas we maneuvered through at times were so narrow you could skip a rock across it (almost). The water was calm enough as well. It was more like cruising a lake than a sea for sure. If someone blindfolded you and dropped you here, not many would guess Chile. Imagine lots of evergreen trees, clear smooth water and glaciers. Maybe Norway? Yes, that would be a good guess. It seems that Chile, Norway and the state of Alaska are the only places on this globe where you can find this scenery. The area where the Northern Ice Field can be found is called San Rafael Lagoon National Park. This ice field feeds 19 glaciers. It is 4 miles across and 47 miles long. It is known for it's beauty and calving (this is when a piece of the glacier breaks off). When a calving occurs, the ice splinters off and crashes into the sea. What a sight and a sound. It sounds like jet engines! A good science lesson was watching the ice calving off and not hearing it until a few seconds after it hit the water. It took that long for the sound to travel to us. We took a catamaran from our ship for an up close look at this ice fiels and got to within about 100 yards of it. Although it is beautiful to see the ice splinter off, you can imagine what that that might mean. Is it normal climate change or has global warming found Chile? The local government has marked the stone mountains that surround the ice fields with dates. Why dates? They have marked the mountains with dates of where the ice field "used" to be! The 1962 date stood out in my mind as that was the year before I was born. The amount of area of ice field that has been "lost" is about 500 yards from the spot it was marked back to the ice face of the ice field! That is a TON of ice! It is hard to explain really, as the area across the front of the ice field is probably about 250 yards maybe more. There is another ice field in Chile called the Southern Ice Field! We did not see that one. I guess we will have to come back.